Authors: Erik Larson
With Churchill absent, the Admiralty became a much quieter place. Ordinarily, he kept a very close hand on naval matters, including details of day-to-day operations that, at least in theory, were supposed to be left to the number two Admiralty official, the First Sea Lord. This put the forty-year-old Churchill in direct conflict with the seventy-four-year-old occupant of that post, Adm. Jacky Fisher.
If Churchill resembled a bulldog, Fisher was a large bulb-eyed toad, dead ringer for a future actor named László Löwenstein, better known by the stage name Peter Lorre. Like Churchill, Fisher was strong-willed and tended to consume himself with the minute details of naval operations. When both men were present, tension was the order of the day. One naval official wrote to his wife, “
The situation is curious—two very strong and clever men, one old, wily and of vast experience, one young, self-assertive, with a great self-satisfaction but unstable. They cannot work together, they cannot both run the show.” Churchill seemed bent on usurping Fisher’s role.
Churchill’s “energy and capacity for work were almost frightening,” wrote intelligence chief Blinker Hall. “Notes and memoranda on every conceivable subject would stream forth from his room at all hours of the day and night. What was worse, he would demand information which would ordinarily and properly have gone only to the First Sea Lord or Chief of Staff, a fact which more than once led to some confusion and an unmerited word of rebuke.”
What made their relationship still more turbulent was the fact that Fisher seemed to be tottering on the verge of madness. Wrote Hall, “
Gradually we in the Admiralty could not help becoming aware that the Fisher we had known was no longer with us. In his place was a sorely harassed and disillusioned man who was overtaxing his strength in the attempt to carry on. He might still on occasion show the old flashes of brilliance, but, beneath the surface, all was far from being well.… At any moment, we felt, the breaking-point would come.” Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, likewise grew concerned. “
The state of affairs at Head Quarters,” he wrote, in an April 26 letter to a fellow officer, “is as bad or worse than I feared. It is lamentable that things should be as they are, and there is no doubt whatever that the Fleet is rapidly losing confidence in the administration.”
Churchill acknowledged Fisher’s energy and prior genius. “
But he was seventy-four years old,” Churchill wrote, in an oblique evisceration. “As in a great castle which has long contended with time, the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact
and seemingly everlasting. But the outworks and the battlements had fallen away, and its imperious ruler dwelt only in the special apartments and corridors with which he had a lifelong familiarity.” This, however, was exactly what Churchill had hoped for in bringing Fisher back as First Sea Lord. “
I took him because I knew he was
old
and
weak
, and that I should be able to keep things in my own hands.”
By May 1915, Churchill wrote, Fisher was suffering from “
great nervous exhaustion.” With Churchill gone to Paris, Fisher was in charge and seemed barely up to the task. “
He had evinced unconcealed distress and anxiety at being left alone in sole charge of the admiralty,” Churchill wrote. “There is no doubt that the old Admiral was worried almost out of his wits by the immense pressure of the times and by the course events had taken.”
In Churchill’s absence, an incident took place that seemed to reinforce his concerns about Fisher’s sanity. Before leaving for France, Churchill had told his wife, Clementine, “
Just look after ‘the old boy’ for me,” and so Clementine invited Fisher to come to lunch. She neither liked nor trusted Fisher and doubted he could withstand the stress of having to run the Admiralty in her husband’s absence. The lunch went well, however, and Fisher departed. Or so Clementine thought.
Soon afterward, she too left the sitting room, and found that Fisher was still in the house, “lurking in the passage,” according to an account by the Churchills’ daughter Mary. Clementine was startled, Mary recalled. “She asked him what he wanted, whereupon, in a brusque and somewhat incoherent manner he told her that, while she no doubt was under the impression that Winston was conferring with Sir John French, he was in fact frolicking with a mistress in Paris!”
To Clementine, this was a ludicrous charge. She snapped, “Be quiet, you silly old man, and get out.”
With Churchill in Paris, the torrent of notes and telegrams he generated daily—“
the constant bombardment of memoranda and minutes on every conceivable subject, technical or otherwise,” as Fisher’s assistant described it—abruptly subsided. Relative to the
turmoil that ordinarily existed in its halls, the Admiralty now became quiescent, if not to say inattentive.
A
T THE
U.S. E
MBASSY
in Berlin, Ambassador James W. Gerard received a curt, two-paragraph note from the German Foreign Office. The message, dated Wednesday, May 5, cited the fact that in preceding weeks “
it has repeatedly occurred” that neutral ships had been sunk by German submarines in the designated war zone. In one case, the note said, a U-boat sank a neutral ship “on account of the inadequate illumination of its neutral markings in the darkness.”
The note urged Gerard to convey these facts to Washington and to recommend that the United States “again warn American shipping circles against traversing the war zone without taking due precautions.” Ships, the note said, should be sure to make their neutral markings “as plain as possible and especially to have them illuminated promptly at nightfall and throughout the night.”
Gerard relayed this to the State Department the next day.
I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, President Wilson found himself in emotional turmoil, for reasons unrelated to ships and war.
By now he had fallen ever more deeply in love with Edith Galt, and with the prospect of no longer being alone. On the evening of Tuesday, May 4, Wilson sent his Pierce-Arrow to pick up Edith and bring her to the White House for dinner. She wore a white satin gown with “
creamy lace, and just a touch of emerald-green velvet at the edge of the deep square neck, and green slippers to match,” she recalled. Afterward, Wilson led her out onto the South Portico, where they sat by themselves, without chaperone. The evening was warm, the air fragrant with the rich perfume of a Washington spring. He told her he loved her.
She was stunned. “Oh, you can’t love me,” she said, “for you don’t really know me; and it is less than a year since your wife died.”
Wilson, unfazed, said, “I was afraid, knowing you, that I would shock you,” he said, “but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife.”
So not just love, itself a striking declaration—but marriage.
Edith turned him down. She leavened her rejection with a note she composed later that night, after Wilson dropped her at her apartment. “It is long past midnight,” she wrote, early Wednesday morning, May 5. “I have been sitting in the big chair by the window, looking out into the night, ever since you went away, my whole being is awake and vibrant!”
She told him that his expression of love and confession of loneliness had left her anguished. “How I want to help! What an unspeakable pleasure and privilege I deem it to be allowed to share these tense, terrible days of responsibility, how I thrill to my very finger tips when I remember the tremendous thing you said to me tonight, and how pitifully poor I am, to have nothing to offer you in return. Nothing—I mean—in proportion to your own great gift!”
Here she joined the universal struggle shared by men and women throughout time, to temper rejection so as not to lose a friend forever.
“I am a woman—and the thought that you have
need
of me—is sweet!” she wrote. “But, dear kindred spirit, can you not trust me and let me lead you from the thought that you have forfeited anything by your fearless honesty to the conviction that, with such frankness between us, there is nothing to fear—we will help and hearten each other.”
She added, “You have been honest with me, and, perhaps, I was too frank with you—but if so forgive me!”
Later that morning, with the sun up and the day under way, Edith and Helen Bones went for another walk in Rock Creek Park. They sat on some rocks to rest. Helen glared at Edith and said, “
Cousin Woodrow looks really ill this morning.” Helen loved her cousin and was protective of him.
She nicknamed him “Tiger,” not
because of some lascivious bent, but because, as Edith later told the story, “he was so pathetic caged there in the White House, longing to come and go, as she did, that he reminded her of a splendid Bengal tiger she had once seen—never still, moving, restless, resentful of his bars that shut out the larger life God had made for him.” Now, in the park, Helen burst into tears. “
Just as I thought some happiness was coming into his life!” she said. “And now you are breaking his heart.”
In a strangely cinematic intervention, Dr. Grayson suddenly appeared from a nearby stand of trees, riding a horse—a large white horse no less. He asked Helen what had happened, and she quickly answered that she had tripped and fallen. “
I don’t think he believed her,” Edith wrote, “but he pretended to and rode on.”
His arrival was a timely thing, she added, “for I was starting to feel like a criminal, and guilty of base ingratitude.” She tried to explain to Helen that she wasn’t being an “ogre”; rather, she simply could not “consent to something I did not feel.” She told Helen that she understood she was “
playing with fire where [Wilson] was concerned, for his whole nature was intense and did not willingly wait; but that I must have time really to know my own heart.”
Edith’s rejection caused Wilson great sorrow and left him feeling almost disoriented as world events clamored for his attention. Even Britain had become a growing source of irritation. In its drive to halt the flow of war matériel to Germany, British warships had stopped American ships and seized American cargoes. Early in the war Wilson had grown concerned that Britain’s actions might so outrage the American public as to cause serious conflict between the two nations. Diplomacy eased tensions, for a time. But then on March 11, 1915, in response to Germany’s “war zone” declaration of the preceding month, the British government issued a new, and startling, “Order in Council” proclaiming its formal intent to stop every ship sailing to or from Germany, whether neutral or not, and to stop ships bound even for neutral ports, to determine whether their cargoes might ultimately end up in German hands. Britain also sharply increased the list of products it would henceforth view
as contraband. The order outraged Wilson, who sent a formal protest in which he described Britain’s plan as “
an almost unqualified denial of the sovereign rights of the nations now at peace.”
The note achieved nothing. Complaints poured in from American shippers whose cargoes had been detained or confiscated, although the State Department did succeed in securing
the prompt release of an automobile shipped by an American socialite. For the British the stakes were simply too high to allow compromise. As Britain’s ambassador to America, Cecil Spring Rice, had written the previous fall, “
In the life and death struggle in which we are now engaged it is essential to prevent war supplies reaching the German armies and factories.”
America’s neutrality seemed harder and harder to maintain. In a letter to a female friend, Mary Hulbert, Wilson wrote, “
Together England and Germany are likely to drive us crazy, because it looks oftentimes as if they were crazy themselves, the unnecessary provocations they invent.”
Still, Wilson recognized the fundamental difference that existed between how the two sides executed their campaigns against merchant traffic. The Royal Navy behaved in civil fashion and often paid for the contraband it seized; Germany, on the other hand, seemed increasingly willing to sink merchant ships without warning, even those bearing neutral markings. The torpedo attack on the
Gulflight
was a case in point. Within the State Department, Undersecretary Robert Lansing warned that in light of the
Gulflight
attack the United States was duty bound to adhere to Wilson’s February declaration vowing to hold Germany “to a strict accountability” for its actions. Wilson made no public comment, but he and Secretary of State Bryan, in background conversations with reporters, signaled that the administration would treat the incident in judicious fashion. “
No formal diplomatic action will be taken by the United States Government … until all the facts have been ascertained and a determination reached,” the
New York Times
reported in a front-page story on Wednesday, May 5.
In fact, Wilson found the
Gulflight
incident disquieting. This was an American ship; the attack had killed three men. What’s
more, it had occurred without warning. While the incident didn’t strike Wilson as having the magnitude to draw the nation into war, it did demand some kind of protest. That Wednesday, he cabled his friend Colonel House, still in London, to ask his advice on what kind of response to send to Germany.
House recommended “
a sharp note” but added, “I am afraid a more serious breach may at any time occur, for they seem to have no regard for consequences.”
A
BOARD THE
L
USITANIA
,
THE
C
UNARD
D
AILY
B
ULLETIN
kept passengers abreast of war news but, like its counterparts on land, reported only broad movements of forces, as if war were a game played with tiles and dice, not flesh-and-blood men. These reports did not begin to capture the reality of the fighting then unfolding on the ground, particularly in the Dardanelles, where the Allied naval and ground offensive had stalled and British and French forces had dug trenches that mimicked those on the western front.